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A Sneak Peek at Star Trek Online's Season 8.5

The latest update to Star Trek Online, Season 8.5, is just around the corner, and we have some pleasant surprises for you.

The update will be releasing on January 30, 2014, as part of Star Trek Online’s 4th anniversary celebration. Participating in the usual fun and games with Q will let you earn a cool new starship (or three!). Federation, Romulan Republic, and Klingon Defense Force scientists have been hard at work adapting Dyson technology to their standard ship designs, and you can be among the first to try out these new hybrid starships.

We also will be releasing a new featured episode alongside the update – it stars a Star Trek actor who will bring their character to STO for the first time. We’re excited to be continuing the storyline for the game with this amazing episode, and we’ll be announcing who this actor is in about a week, when you will get your first sneak peek at the episode.

We’re not stopping there, though.

The STO team is always working to improve the game. In Season 8, we updated the Federation tutorial to improve the initial experience. In this update, we have made a pass at 12 episodes in the early Federation experience, updating the episodes to hit a higher quality bar with both art and gameplay improvements throughout.

Another area we looked at was the hourly event calendar. Our data showed that few of these events were being played often, and so we are re-envisioning the hourly events as weekend-long events with better rewards. You can expect the hourly calendar to disappear with Season 8.5, with the new events showing up on the main calendar. Additionally, a small selection of the existing hourly events is being turned into Daily missions – we’ll provide more information on this soon.

And there's something exciting for players that have many starships in Spacedock. With the Season 8.5 update, you will be able to easily switch between your starships in sector space and social zones – we want to make it easy to quickly get to the ship you want to fly. Not only that, but each of your starships can have multiple pre-made build-outs saved, and you will be able to switch between them quickly and easily. Now you will be able to prepare separate PvE and PvP builds, or have a special anti-Voth spec for your ships waiting to quickly be swapped in. Equipping ships also gets easier with the new “easy equip” feature coming in the update. In addition, we’re going to be increasing the current ship slot limit. You’re going to love it!

We have many more details on this update coming your way in a series of dev blogs during the next two weeks as we approach the release date. All of the features above and more will be covered in depth by the team.

We look forward to seeing you on update day to enjoy all the new changes and to celebrate the 4th anniversary of Star Trek Online!